My name is danah boyd and I'm a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder/president of Data & Society. Buzzwords in my world include: privacy, context, youth culture, social media, big data. I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever I'm thinking.

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a book exercise

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Just as we are afraid of ghosts and of the God of the panopticon insofar as they are imaginary non-entities – that is, because they do not exist – so, according to lacan, we love God precisely because he does not exist.

I had to fudge it. The first two books i picked up didn’t have 5 sentences on page 23. Leave it to Derrida and JL Austin to have rather long sentences that fill the page. Thus, i went with Bentham’s “The Panopticon Writings” (which were out due to a recent debate with my roommate).

Note: catching up on blog reading, but i thought that this exercise was fun!

11 comments to a book exercise

apophenia: a book exercise Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Drifting in and out of reality and the adjustments that accompany this we…

“Since the remote probe monitors and organizes data traffic occurring on the distant network, this considerably reduces the amount of information that would otherwise be required to be transmitted to the network management station for analysis.”

Here’s a seductive meme my friend danah turned me on to: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. “Otherwise unharmed,…

Here’s a seductive meme my friend danah turned me on to: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. “Otherwise unharmed,…

apophenia: a book exercise From Caterina: 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. However, in an invocation of a method with a pa…